The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

When it comes to war, popular culture focuses on men. These female combat veterans are uprooting that bias.

They’re doing it through writing and storytelling

By
April 9, 2018 at 12:19 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Emily Wax-Thibodeaux.

Women have served in every American conflict dating back to the Revolution. Yet the most famous books, films and television shows about war are about men. And when women in the military are included, they’re often portrayed as highly sexualized characters, like Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan from “M.A.S.H.”

Jenny Pacanowski, a former combat medic in Iraq, is trying to change the narrative.

Pacanowski, a poet and writing coach, is part of a growing national movement to bring the unvarnished experiences of women who have served into mainstream popular culture. As a result, more female veterans are attending memoir-writing retreats, learning new storytelling skills at workshops for stand-up comedy, screenwriting and improv, and performing in poetry slams and plays.

Women are the fastest-growing group of veterans. Do they get the recognition they deserve?

Pacanowski’s workshop for combat women is called Female Veterans Empowered to Transition. It’s in Bethlehem, Pa., and it takes place about once a month, with several women huddled with notebooks and laptops near a crackling fire while her puppy naps atop blankets. Books filled with Vietnam War-era poetry are strewn across a table.

She often tells her participants: “This is a place of fierce kindness, compassion, nonjudgment. You have the freedom to be vulnerable.”

Army truck driver Lyn Watson has been attending Pacanowski’s writing workshops every month for more than two years.

“In this little space, we finally get to be heard,” she said. “And I think that it’s only going to spread outside these walls.”

Jerri Bell, a retired naval officer, also leads writing workshops for female veterans at a VA hospital in Washington, D.C. Bell is the managing editor of O-Dark-Thirty, a literary journal for veterans, and in 2017, she co-authored a book with Tracy Crow, a retired Marine Corps officer.

The two unearthed thousands of letters and journals for their book, “It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan.”

Women in the military

Under pressure to acknowledge that female service members were often already in combat, the Pentagon officially opened all jobs to women in 2015. Women are now the fastest-growing group in the military, and there are nearly 2 million female veterans in the country.

Yet when Americans think about war, they still typically think of men, said Peter Molin, a retired Army infantry officer who deployed to Afghanistan and now teaches writing at Rutgers University.

“It’s definitely an entrenched male tradition in the country’s popular mind. And it’s just wrong because it hides their outstanding contributions,” Molin said.

A male-dominated culture

The military is like a “massive frat party. With weapons,” Kayla Williams, a former sergeant and Arabic linguist, writes in her critically acclaimed book "Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army.”

“Hey, Kayla! Show us your boobs!” she recounts in one passage. “I was on a mountain near the Syrian border. At this time, I may well have been the most forward-deployed female soldier in Iraq.”

Military women need a voice in the #MeToo movement

The male soldiers offered her money, and some “smart-ass threw in some M&M’s.”

Williams, who is now director of the Center for Women Veterans at Veterans Affairs, said more women should be “writing themselves back into history,” penning works that focus not only on trauma, but also on triumph — ways they fought bravely or saved fellow soldiers.

“How can anyone know we even existed when our history is hidden?” Williams said.